The captain, a small, white, recumbent spectre, lifted his head and appeared to sniff the smoke judicially.

“They get a chance at us, more like!” he grumbled.  “My opinion, the blighters have shot and burnt themselves into a state o’ mind; bloomin’ delusion o’ grandeur, that’s what.  Wildest of ’em will rush us to-night, once—­maybe twice.  We stave ’em off, say:  that case, they’ll settle down to starve us, right and proper.”

“Siege,” assented Heywood.

“Siege, like you read about.”  The captain lay flat again.  “Wish a man could smoke up here.”

Heywood laughed, and turned his head:—­

“How much do you know about sieges, old chap?”

“Nothing,” Rudolph confessed.

“Nor I, worse luck.  Outside of school—­testudine facia, that sort of thing.  However,” he went on cheerfully, “we shall before long”—­He broke off with a start.  “Rudie!  By Jove, I forgot!  Did you find them?  Where’s Bertha Forrester?”

“Gone,” said Rudolph, and struggling to explain, found his late adventure shrunk into the compass of a few words, far too small and bare to suggest the magnitude of his decision.  “They went,” he began, “in a boat—­”

He was saved the trouble; for suddenly Captain Kneebone cried in a voice of keen satisfaction, “Here they come!  I told ye!”—­and fired his rifle.

Through a patch of firelight, down the gentle slope of the field, swept a ragged cohort of men, some bare-headed, some in their scarlet nightcaps, as though they had escaped from bed, and all yelling.  One of the foremost, who met the captain’s bullet, was carried stumbling his own length before he sank underfoot; as the Mausers flashed from between the sand-bags, another and another man fell to his knees or toppled sidelong, tripping his fellows into a little knot or windrow of kicking arms and legs; but the main wave poured on, all the faster.  Among and above them, like wreckage in that surf, tossed the shapes of scaling-ladders and notched bamboos.  Two naked men, swinging between them a long cylinder or log, flashed through the bonfire space and on into the dark below the wall.

“Pung-dongs!” bawled the captain.  “Look out for the pung-dong!”

His friends were too busy firing into the crowded gloom below.  Rudolph, fumbling at side-bolt and pulling trigger, felt the end of a ladder bump his forehead, saw turban and mediaeval halberd heave above him, and without time to think of firing, dashed the muzzle of his gun at the climber’s face.  The shock was solid, the halberd rang on the platform, but the man vanished like a shade.

“Very neat,” growled Heywood, who in the same instant, with a great shove, managed to fling down the ladder.  “Perfectly silly attack.  We’ll hold ’em.”